3 Answers
3

White Court vampires in general stick with a single "flavor" of emotion. There are multiple references to the fact that this is not a true limitation. However, there is a systematic limit, which makes it a bit murkier.

From OW89:

Instead of blood, White Court vampires consume psychic energies—the
pure life force—generated from strong emotions like lust, fear,
hatred, pain, and despair through physical contact. They merge their
own energy with that of the prey, allowing their Hunger to “dance”
through the victim’s aura, thus transforming their prey’s life energy
into their own; they then pull this away.

From OW90

While a White Court vampire can feed on several types of emotions, the
three main bloodlines of the White Court tend to stick with a single
“flavor”: House Malvora feeds on fear, House Raith feeds on lust, and
House Skavis feeds on pain and despair.

Additionally, White Court vampires suffer injury from True expressions
of pure, selfless emotions considered the “opposite” of the one they
mostly feed on.

Again, emphasis mine.

However, from a system-based standpoint, turn to YS189 and look at Emotional Vampire:

Musts: You must choose the emotion associated with this power when you take it.

Can this be bought off then, from the indications in Our World? It doesn't really say. But for all intents and purposes, from the limits in RPG, the must is a hard limit. And since the question refers to limits at character creation, the answer is, yes, there is a limit that must be chosen.

Is there any reason Emotional Vampire could not be taken again, choosing a different emotion? (So long as it fit their High Concept or character development, of course.)
–
SevenSidedDieMar 22 '13 at 18:49

1

@SevenSidedDie - There's nothing I know of in the rules that would prevent that, but there is no precedent for that in the Dresdenverse so it'd be totally up to the GM. Pretty interesting character, though. Possibly a hybrid from 2 houses.
–
CthosMar 22 '13 at 19:31

2

@SevenSidedDie Proven Guilty has an example of a Raith-family WCV who feeds on fear. He's regarded as a pervert at best by his relatives.
–
BESWMar 22 '13 at 21:56

White Court vampires belong to various families. The families each have a different emotion they feed on, usually a "negative" one. (I will ignore here the fact that such judgements can be tricky - what is it, exactly, that makes Lust negative, for example? People have done stupid and destructive things for Love, too, right?)

But leaving that aside, the simple answer is:

A White Court vampire feeds from and is able to stoke a single kind of emotion.

Yes. They can feed from multiple emotions, but bear in mind that also drastically increases what is bane to them as well, as the opposite emotions to what they feed on are also the bane of the individual Vampires. Increasing what they feed on increases what hurts them. Increase the options enough, and the Vampire will be getting hurt by all sorts of opposed true emotions.

In the books, Thomas is in House Raith and as such grew up feeding on lust, which has lead to him being harmed by True Love. Thus items that are marked with a True Love aspect are bane to him. In fact, Lara Raith has a circle shaped scar on her hand from where she touched a wedding ring marked with True Love.

Now consider Madrigal Raith. As part of the Raith family he started out feeding on Lust, but as the story continued, he changed houses and started feeding on Fear as well. It came with the added refresh cost of adding another emotion to incite with the Incite Emotion power (as he'd need to be able to incite the emotion he wants to feed on), but other than that, no other refresh would need to be spent. Sure, Madrigal can now feed on both Lust and Fear, but he can also be harmed by True Love and True Courage. The trade off is that while Madrigal can now feed on more emotions, he can be hurt by more (a steep cost if you ask me).